Can your retirement income be the luck of the draw?

On behalf of The Flanigan Law Group, A Professional Corporation posted in Estate Planning on Sunday, January 25, 2015.

In our prior posts, we highlighted the benefit of not using a New Year’s resolution as a means of creating (or adjusting) one’s estate plan. We have also discussed how you can jumpstart your retirement plan by taking some easy steps to save money when you have windfalls. Despite the work you may put into your plan, or the cautiousness in which you save, sometimes security in retirement is due to factors outside of your control. You may even call it the luck of the draw.

Arguably the best example of this is how people who are set to retire in the near future (circa 2014) are only set to replace about 40 percent of their pre-retirement income with assets accumulated through their investment portfolio. This pales in comparison to those who retired in 2000, where investment assets would be enough to replace just about all of a person’s income before retirement.

Of course, the status of the stock market at the time of retirement could have something to do with this. In 2000, for example, this was just before the dot-com bubble burst; and stocks were (at the time) nearly at an all-time high. However, those who retired (or attempted to retire) in 2007 or 2008 may have been out of luck.

The moral of the story here is that a retirement portfolio must have balance between stocks, bonds, real property and cash. Of course, there are ways to protect your investment through estate planning tools. An experienced attorney can help you.

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